Boss Goggles: The two views owners can have of the same experience

So recently I’ve run into a recurring comment from business owners when they are being approached about running an offer again. It generally goes:

“Daily Deal buyers only came in for the deal, and no one spent any money above the face value of the voucher.”

Or they say:

“Daily Deal people were nothing but problems.”

I’ve been tracking the behavior of the people who say things like this vs the people who are eager to resign and continue working with their daily deal provider of choice, and here’s what I’ve found out.

There is a type of blindness that comes from being the operator of a business. The long hours, unforgiving schedule, and endless number of things to deal with mean that operators filter what they deal with. When this is the case then owners are only brought the problems that their staff can’t, or doesn’t want to, deal with. But they never hear about the person who came it, had a great experience, and moved on. These owners end up with a laundry list of complaints, and no balancing positive experiences. It’s not that the good didn’t happen, but they’ve become blind to it.

Alternatively, there are some operators that spend the extra effort to track what happens at each transaction. They end up with a full record of what every person, the daily deal user and regular customer, deliver to their business. With this data the business’ can see what really happened and compare it to the problems that had to be dealt with. Every single merchant who has done this maintains multi year relationships with their daily deal provider, and almost all of them increase their daily deal spend.

The difference is so stark it’s unmistakeable what’s happening. Now I don’t have the means to evaluate these facts beyond my little pond I work within. However, this is not a subtle difference where I am I can predict with 99% accuracy who will be a repeat daily deal merchant based upon no other information then their tracking of redemption behavior.

So for all of you operating a daily deal site it’s becoming clear that their is a competitive advantage if you have tools for your merchant to track. And if you can get your merchants to use them! And it you’re a rep selling these products then you should invest the effort of getting your merchants to track behavior. It’s better to get someone’s business